I will not be buying the Orange Box. I really like Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. I have already purchased them once so that I could play them whenever I want to. I do not feel the need to purchase them again just to get Episode 2. I don't care about Team Fortress 2 and I don't care about Portal. I was willing to buy the Black Box to get Episode 2, but there is no way in Hell that I am going buy the Orange Box and end up with another copy of HL2 and Episode 1! Everyone I know that wanted HL2 already has it, so I would be stuck with additional copies, which amounts to wasted money. I hate wasting money, so that isn't going to happen.

The ESRB handed Rockstar an Adults Only (AO) rating for their upcoming title "Manhunt 2". Because this title was only coming out on Sony and Nintendo systems, which do not permit AO-rated games for their systems, Rockstar has a limited set of options available to them. In case you're wondering, Microsoft does not allow AO games for its consoles, either.

Option one, which would be a best case scenario for Rockstar, is to appeal the ESRB rating and win an Mature (M) rating for Manhunt 2. An M rating would allow the game to be released as scheduled.

Option two would be to tone the game down enough to make it to the M territory. This would mean a delay in the release of the game, but the game would eventually be released. Given the nature of this game, this may not be a realistic option.

Option three, rework the game and release it on the PC. It will still have an AO rating, which would keep it out of just about every retail outlet on Earth, but it could potentially be sold via digital distribution channels or Take-2 could sell it directly to consumers.

The option I'd like to see Rockstar and Take-2 choose is what I call Option four. Option four is to not release the game at all and seek some counselling for the issues that are clearly sitting at a slow boil in the employees of Rockstar and Take-2.

Why do I say that? Because no one in their right mind would think a "game" where the object is to maim, torture and kill people for fun is a game that should be made, let alone played. Yes, many other games feature killing the enemy. Those games, however, usually have an objective above and beyond mass murder for the sake of committing mass murder, such as rescuing hostages, saving the country and saving the world.

Manhunt 2 has no redeeming value. It does not make a socially relevant statement. It is in no way "pushing the envelope". Manhunt 2 is nothing more than an exercise in extremely poor taste on the part of the developers and extremely bad judgement on the part of Take-2. I am completely against censorship, but I am equally against just plain senseless.

As some of you may be aware, I have Road Runner as my Internet access provider. As you may also be aware, I have been less than ecstatic about the service I have been provided by this subsidiary of Time Warner. Nothing illustrates this better than the visit I had from a Road Runner tech this afternoon.

My Internet connection was being its usually flaky self this week. After having no connectivity all day Wednesday, I made an appointment to have a tech come and see if he could determine why Road Runner sucks so badly, at least at my house. As is typically the case, once I made the appointment, everything started working. It worked for two days straight, which is unusual at my house.

So, thinking that Time Warner may have actually gotten their act together, I canceled the service call. You can probably guess what happened next. If you can't, I'll tell you. My Internet connectivity disappeared within an hour of my canceling of the service call. To say that I was not happy would be a severe understatement.

My wife was willing to call Time Warner for me and see if she could get the appointment reinstated. Since I was extremely upset with Time Warner, I agreed. She was able to get the appointment back on the books for today without much trouble. Had I called, I probably would have gotten us banned from using any Time Warner service ever again.

The technician arrived at about 1:30PM, which happened to be within the 11:00AM to 2:00PM I had originally been given for today's previous appointment. The tech checked out the modem, the signal amplifier in the basement, and the connection outside. What he found nearly sent me into an apoplectic fit.

It turns out that there are two cables coming into our house. One is for the television signal and one is for our broadband Internet connection. In the four years we have lived here, we have had at least six visits regarding out Internet and/or television service. None of the previous technicians ever found that the two cables were mis-connected at the box on the side of our house.

The reason they were mis-connected is due to the fact that they were mis-labeled. How they got to be mis-labeled is a mystery, at least to me. The important thing is that they are now correctly connected and this correction should improve the performance of both our television and Internet services, not to mention my blood pressure.

I'm a bit of a pack rat, just ask my wife. I am, however, pretty selective in the things I keep. For example, I keep all the boxes to my hardware and software, but I do not keep most of the dozen or so magazines I subscribe to much longer than two months. This particular habit has proved quite valuable a number of times, particularly when I am selling hardware I no longer need.

The reason I bring this up is two-fold. One, I have a scanner that came with a slide adapter that a friend just happens to be interested in purchasing from me. This particular scanner is about seven years old. Had I not kept everything that came with it, including the box it originally came in, I might not have been able to sell it. Selling it gets it out of my basement and makes my wife happy, which is a very good thing.

The second reason I bring this up is that, while looking for the slide adapter for the scanner I sold, I happened across some true gaming gems from the days of DOS. For those of you too young to remember DOS, think of Linux, but without graphics. Those of you old enough to remember creating autoexec.bat files for individual games and having to know the memory address ranges required by your sound card will probably remember the games I stumbled across this evening.

The first gem I came across was Might & Magic III: Islands of Terra. I remember spending nearly a hundred hours playing one of the milestone games in a storied franchise. I also found a copy of the very first Alone in the Dark game from back in 1993. Back then, this game was ahead of its time. Heck, there are gameplay elements in this game that still hold up today. Clive Barker's Undying is the only other game I've played that had the same "jumping out of your skin" impact that I experienced playing Alone in the Dark.

Alone in the Dark also had a very clever copy protection mechanism. The game included a little booklet filled with images of objects in the game. In order to start the game, you had to correctly tell the game the page number of the object it asked you for. No StarForce, no checks for virtual drive software, just a simple question that could (at least then) only be answered if you had a complete copy of the game.

I know that I won't load and play my copy of Alone in the Dark. I have too many fond memories to subject one of my favorite gaming experiences to the harsh reality of today's hardware. While Alone in the Dark was a ground-breaking game in its day, technology has a cruel way of turning nostalgia into something far more sinister. I'm leaving my nostalgia safely tucked inside the cardboard box it came in.

The talking heads (and those that speak from another, lower, portion of their anatomy) will offer up their typically half-baked theories on this, each one more half-baked than the last. Some will point to Virginia's fairly lax gun laws and blame them, even though he could have made his purchases in any state in the Union. Then there will be the candidate's for President making what they believe to be perfectly sensible remarks, no matter how off-base those remarks might be.

What no one with political aspirations will do, however, is call for stricter gun control measures at the Federal level. This is because they all want the votes of the NRA membership. Backing gun control at the Federal level is political suicide, unless your last name is Kennedy.

What all these candidates will do, though, is jump on the violence bandwagon and start blaming violent media in all its forms, television, movies and video games. They will do this because it is easy, not because there is any scientific evidence that links violent media, in any form, to causing violent behavior.

The mainstream media will jump on this as well, for the same reason. They have no end of sound bite producing 'experts' ready and willing to espouse the same tired arguments to anyone and everyone, whether they are willing to listen or not. Given mainstream media's dislike for actual debate, anyone willing and able to refute the barrage of blather will be left standing in silence, unheard and unwated by the media powers-that-be.

The saddest part of this terrible tragedy will be in the zero-sum effect it has on politics, gun laws, and sensationalized media. Six months from now, this will be something you can ony read about if you do some pretty diligent searching on the Internet for archived articles and video clips. This is my fear and I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.

Silverfall was released this week and should be sitting on a store shelf right now. The amazing part about this is that the scheduled release date was 3/27/2007. That means Atari released Silverfall a week early! When is the last time that happened? S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was released this week, as well. It, however, has been indevelopment for years and was originally due out back when DirectX 8 was new. Plenty of mention is made of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s extended development time, but no mention at all (that I am aware of, anyway)  has been made of the fact that Silverfall shipped early. Why is that?